This week’s Independent features a letter from a reader, Rich Ciolino, who chastises Santa Barbara School Board President Nancy Harter for language she used in a budget cut meeting. As Ethan Stewart reported in his coverage of the event, Harter said, “Yikes! That sucks,” upon realizing that she had just cut the job of a teacher in attendance. Ciolino found the word choice unbecoming. “It distresses me: that one of our elected educational officials is incapable of communicating without resorting to such slang, especially when speaking in public,” Ciolino wrote.

Indeed, the notion of pejorative “sucking” is common in American English. Ask any fourteen-year-old what they think of, say, Celine Dion. They will most likely respond with “She sucks.” And though the response is designed to disparage Ms. Dion, I doubt many of those using it would have done so with the intention of implying the profanity.

To me, “that sucks” has always been a problematic turn of phrase. I learned it as child, long before I understood why it is impolite. When corrected by my parents or teachers, I’d retort with “But why is it bad?” And any adult with a brain in his head would just brush off the question, for fear of explaining fellatio to an inquisitive child with a knack for running his mouth off. Only my seventh grade teacher ever dared to venture into the forbidden zone with the response “It’s what’s being sucked, Drew.” Then she cut the discussion off, rightly feeling her job teaching at a Catholic school was at stake.

Dictionaries - like teachers and parents - agree that claiming a thing sucks is a nod to oral sex. These books differ, however, on whether the expression is offensive or not. The American Heritage Dictionary goes as far to label this usage as “vulgar slang,” while Webster stops at just “slang.” The Wikitionary lets the phrase off the easiest, with just a note of it being “colloquial.”

What sucks most?

The catch here, as I see it, is that the verb “to suck” is most often used with a direct object, as in “The machine sucks water through a pipe.” In this case, “water” is the direct object, receiving the action of the verb. With Harter’s use of it, the direct object is omitted. And we’re all pretty certain she wasn’t talking about water suction.

With the direct object left unsaid, Harter could have been referring to anything. I could postulate that she was presumably trying to say “Yikes! That sucks: all sense of hope from this awful meeting of budget cuts.” Another possibility: “Yikes! That sucks: lemons, which taste sour and unpleasant.” If I wanted to be an ass, I could even say that the profanity has all but drained from the expression through overuse, and any sense of something sexual was only in the minds of word nerds - like me - and puritanical individuals who tend to read smut into everything.

Direct object or no direct object, “That sucks” is just an expression, and one I feel has become acceptable to mention in mixed company. Other vulgar expressions have managed to escape their dirty origins, the most frequent example of which being “scumbag.” Still not a nice thing to call somebody, “scumbag” came into usage in English to mean something quite specific: a condom, especially a used one.

Of course, Ciolino seemed to find fault specifically with an educated person - the president of the school board, no less! - using a rather base phrase publicly. In that sense, he’s right. However, the way I see it, Harter’s slip of “That sucks” speaks more to the fact that she and the other members of the school board had to make some difficult decisions when it came to paring down the district’s budget.

The way I envision the statement coming out, this member of the school board suddenly realized that the numbers on paper equated directly to people sitting in the audience. If that realization came as the shock I imagine it did, then the reaction was the sudden dismay of the task at hand. Cutting someone’s job right in front of them? Yeah, Nancy. I’m with you on that one.

That does suck.

Drew Mackie also makes words regularly as an Independent reporter and on his pop culture blog, Back of the Cereal Box.

Comments

You have pointed out many different meanings of "that sucks", but it may be that the most relevant is that "it takes my breath away" as in "that sucks wind"... The letter writer clearly had a different, more sexual assumption which probably makes him over 50.

Actually, no dictionary that you mention or link to connects the slang "suck" to fellatio. Sense 5 in American Heritage is clearly a different "suck," since the definition for what you're describing isn't included in that dictionary at all. Merriam-Webster does have the definition but doesn't mention fellatio at all. While it is still debated regularly, some linguists and lexicographers think that "sucks" as it is currently used, such as "Algebra sucks," without a direct object, is probably *not* derived from longer forms such as "Algebra sucks wingwongs" (euphemized to avoid granny filters). There's no question, however, the transitive and intransitive forms have had confluence, but whether that was at the start of "suck" being used in this way, or later in its varied existence, is impossible to say. There are similar terms, such as sucker, as in "Look at that sucker! That must be the biggest deer in the county!" or "Don't be a sucker, dude. It's obviously a scam." Chief Editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Jonathan Lighter, has written that he *does* think there was an obvious sexual origin to the intransitive "suck." Sociolinguist Ron Butters generally does not think ther eis enough evidence to make the connection and has written at length on this subject and had an article about it in the journal "Dictionaries" in 2001.

To add: "Sucker" doesn't seem ever hardly to draw complaints that it's obscene, probably because it isn't and not least because in slang uses it dates to at least as early as the 1860s. Part of the complaints we have here are about changing language, changing perceptions, and changing mores, which means while the etymology of a word is static, it is still unclear, and therefore open to reinterpretation as often current sensibilities permit.

Those in the "mixed" company I keep find it "acceptable" to "mention" the entire range of expression because, unlike Rich Ciolino, our development wasn't arrested at the Beavis and Butthead "she said ... heh heh" stage.

I know this thread is months old, but I found myself back on this article by an errant click. . . .

To add to the earlier "sucking wind" comment, there is a bad--although not heinously bad--connotation to that, or more accurately, "sucking air". For example, whenever something is being "sucked", it's either being pumped or vacuumed. And, when the medium being pumped falls beyond the intake orifice, then the object used is "sucking air". This is the same, for when you drink through a straw, but run out of liquid.

So, at that stage of pumping/vacuuming/drinking process, it can be said that the action is sucking to no benefit, or, "it's (just) sucking air", or more colloquially, "it sucks".

And, due to the connotation of being "bad", the term get applied as a criticism--regardless of whether any actual, physical work on a liquid, powder, or whatever is being done. That's just how language works.

Of course, I also grew up with the phrase, "sucks eggs", which to me is a euphemism for balls, or testicles (Consult your English/Spanish phrasebook for, "chupa mis juevos". More often heard, probably due to the consonation, would be "that sucks donkey [rhymes w/ sticks]", but I can't think of any way to euphemise that!

In a way, I think by using a common slang term, such as "that sucks" makes for more personal conversation. I, too, grew up with this being a rather benign phrase (though I was always admonished by my elders for using it), and when I hear people use it, it directly translates into "that's a real bummer." Personally, when I vent to someone about something unfortunate that has happened in my life, a response of "that sucks," as long as it's not paired with an apathetic tone, is one of the most sympathetic things someone can say. In my opinion, it's much better than a default response such as, "I'm sorry," which always seems like the person doesn't care enough to come up with anything original or emotionally-charged in response.It's largely a matter of culture. I can see how many would find this phrase offensive. However, if I were the teacher who was being cut sitting there, and the head of the school board gave a heart-felt "that sucks!" I would probably feel like she actually had enough sympathy for me to make such an outburst.